Valley Nordic
Chander Chawla, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Arne Tonning, a Norwegian Venture Capitalist, discuss global perspectives on startup business, technology, and culture. The views on the podcast are solely personal and not of our employers or of the organizations we belong to.
Episodes
We discuss:
1. State of the energy markets in Europe and why the prices are going up.
2. How does the electricity grid work?
3. How does the energy pricing work in Europe (excluding gas/petrol)?
4. Opportunity for startups in the energy markets.
We are back after a long summer break. In this episode we get inside Arne's box of B2B SaaS and discuss CAC, LTV, Payback period, and other financial metrics.
We reflect on the last 99 episodes by reviewing the podcast stats, guests who honored us, and the 27 companies we analyzed in the last ~4 years.
What is deglobalization? Why is it happening? What does it mean for startups?
We segment the Metaverse into three categories:
1. Metaverse that requires new hardware to be worn by users (VR headsets, AR glasses, etc.)
2. Metaverse that does not require new hardware but requires crypto (NFTs, wallets, etc.)
3. Metaverse that neither requires new hardware nor crypto
We apply Rogers innovation adoption model to each of the segments to understand if they can have mass adopti...
Elon Musk buying Twitter has been talk of the town in Silicon Valley for the last few days. Arne and I discuss what's happening and why.
Chander's blogpost from 2009 on Twitter's potential.
HP which makes PCs and printers acquires a company, Poly (Plantronics + Polycom), that makes headphones, conference room phones, and cameras. We wonder why.
We discuss Chander's forbes article on management which offers a new framework for looking at management. The framework has four dimensions:
1. Domain Management
2. Organizational Management
3. Perception Management
4. Feelings Management
We discuss top three sectors for new sovereign investments influenced by the current Russia Ukraine war:
1. Energy
2. Defence (Cyber, Weapons, Surveillance)
3. Increased self-reliance (Money, Food)
We discuss what is Web3 (and Web 3.0). How it came about? And, the debate associated with it.
Links to the articles we referenced in the episode:
1. Semantic web
2. Moxie Marlinspike on Web3
3. David Rosenthal on Crypto
We kickoff season 4 with a discussion on what's happening in the financial markets in 2022.
We evaluate the trends we have been tracking since 2019.
See the trends here.
This is our final episode of 2021. We will be back on January 27th, 2022.
We discuss Netflix's entry into games and pontificate on why they would do that.
We discuss:
1. The traditional Venture Capital (VC) business model
2. Why the VC is changing and what changes Sequoia is making
3. Implications for entrepreneurs and for the business of managing money
Useful links
Sequoia announcement
We discuss:
1. Amplitude's products and business (what does the company do?)
2. Amplitude's history (started as Sonalight)
3. Direct listing vs. traditional IPO (why Amplitude chose direct listing)
4. Amplitude's valuation and future prospects
Useful links
1. Amplitude S1
We discuss the Ethereum blockchain and ETH, a cryptocurrency:
- Ethereum vs. Bitcoin
- Proof of work vs. proof of stake consensus mechanism on blockchains
- Ethereum plan to migrate to a proof of stake consensus mechanism
- Ethereum's London update
We are excited to have Mike Polacek as a guest of honor on this episode. Mike is one of the few business leaders who has run large tech businesses and has been a professional investor in public companies.
We dig deeper into the how building semiconductor business is different than building a SaaS business, complexity, Moore's law, and many other interesting subjects related to tech businesses.
I enjoyed my ...
Quick Commerce and its history
Venture Capital flowing to Quick Commerce in Europe
How Quick Commerce might evolve
We discuss the emergence of new companies like Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna which are popularizing the idea of Point of Sale financing i.e. when you are buying something you can choose to pay later. We tried to have structured conversation today:)
- What is BNPL
- History of BNPL
- Why is it happening now
- How does it work
- Who are the players
- Future of BNPL
We discuss the recent Chinese government investigations of Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Didi, etc. Is it good governance and China is leading the world in regulating tech or is it a way to gain more control for the government?
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